Technology in the News

Technology is constantly changing and providing the casual user with
challenges never dreamed of. Technology in the News is provided in an
effort to assist you in getting the most out of your computer, while
avoiding some of the pitfalls. Your computer really isn't out to get
you. Why not learn to be friends?

You've probably already heard about responsive design, which is website design that responds to the device constraints of the person viewing it.

It's a hot topic right now, and with good reason: alternative devices outsell desktop PCs 4 to 1 already, and within three years more Internet traffic in the US will go through mobile devices than through laptops or desktops. All of this is forcing a convergence on what Jeremy Keith calls the "one Web": a single Web that doesn't care what device you're on, how you're viewing content or how you're interacting with it.

Crafting a polished and unique experience for your users is becoming ever more critical as the Web gets more overloaded.

Standing out is hard. To the rescue come frameworks such as jQuery, which offer a modular, highly customizable experience for your visitors. Today, we are thrilled to introduce two new jQuery plug-ins that were developed exclusively for Smashing Magazine readers to liven up your developer tool belts: Orbit, a new slider; and Reveal, a modal plug-in.

Do crazy people have a right to be heard? I think they do - as long as they're American.

But even with crazy people's well known infiltration of the internet - appearing in any blog or news comments section or online forum they can access - they still have a lot of trouble getting people to listen to them. Crazy people used to have to try to spread their views through poorly photocopied newsletters with weird font choices that no sane person would read. But on the internet, crazy people can put their opinions right next to those of sane people. If they can just use a little self-discipline to not immediately identify themselves as cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, they might actually get their ideas read.

Rabbits hop around but that's not very threatening. Hops on a network, however, are a different game. When a rabbit hops on a lawn, each hop adds a yard or so. Not so in a network topology. In a network, the difference between one and two hops is huge. The difference between two and three hops is humongous because the effect of "hops" on traversing a network is exponential rather than additive. Exponential mechanisms don't add, they multiply-and that is the key to understanding a multitude of modern phenomena ranging from viral videos to pandemics.

The Tor Project is a great way for people to cover their tracks on the Internet. Because of this, some in the federal government, specifically the National Security Agency (NSA), really dislikes Tor.

So it comes as a bit of a surprise that the project actually received over $1.8 million in federal money last year. The Tor Project, which provides free software to users interested in surveillance- and censorship-resistant web activity, recently released its financial statements and reports for 2013, and sources began taking note yesterday. The documents show that the State Department directly granted the organization $256,900 as part of its mission to fund "international programs [that] support democracy, human rights and labor."

Do you ever get that creepy feeling like you're being watched in public? That your conversations are being bugged and transmitted to the shadowy headquarters of an organization just looking for ways it can catch you?

Well, good news: The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is thinking about justifying your paranoia. At a city council meeting on Tuesday the boys in blue discussed the possibility of buying some drones...

The long-delayed GOP foreign policy civil war is finally here. For years the Republican Party has fractured over foreign policy, but libertarians and neoconservatives, while vehemently disagreeing on substance, tried to project an air of party cohesion.

Those days are over. "We ignored them and then tried to placate them," said one hawkish Senate Republican foreign policy aide about the libertarians. "If we don't move now [to counterattack], it may be too late in 2016." New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's comments Thursday evening at a gathering of the Republican Governors Association in Aspen, Colo. calling libertarianism "a very dangerous thought" marked an opening salvo of the fight for the Republican Party's identity in an age where a war-weary public wants to focus on the home front. On one side are libertarians like Sen. Rand Paul and others in the Tea Party. On the other, more mainstream conservatives like Christie, Arizona Sen. John McCain and New York Rep. Pete King.

Nearly every week, I hear someone shrug off privacy issues with a claim that they're not worried because they have "nothing to hide" from the government. Let's put a cork in it, once and for all.

"Over the last 16 months, as I've debated this issue around the world, every single time somebody has said to me, 'I don't really worry about invasions of privacy because I don't have anything to hide,' I always say the same thing to them. I get out a pen. I write down my email address. I say, 'Here's my email address. What I want you to do when you get home is email me the passwords to all of your email accounts, not just the nice, respectable work one in your name, but all of them, because I want to be able to just troll through what it is you're doing online, read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if you're not a bad person, if you're doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide.'

US law can apply anywhere in the world, so long as a technology company has control over foreign data, a court rules.

A US judge has ordered Microsoft to hand over foreign data it stores back to the US, despite allegedly strong privacy protections in Europe to mitigate such processes. The logic of the court is that because the US-headquartered software giant controls the data it stores overseas, its foreign subsidiary companies are just as applicable to US law. US District Judge Loretta Preska in New York said the ruling will be stayed to allow Microsoft to appeal the decision to an appeals court. "It is a question of control, not a question of the location of that information," Preska said in the ruling.

[Socialization] - how do you answer the most popular homeschooling question?

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